Category: SDS

Hello, Claus here again. I am very excited about how the RDMA networking landscape is evolving. We took RDMA mainstream in Windows Server 2012 when we introduced SMB Direct and even more so in Windows Server 2016 where Storage Spaces Direct is leveraging SMB Direct for east-west traffic. More partners than ever offer RDMA enabled… Read more

Hello, Claus here again. Today Intel is announcing the Intel Optane SSD DC P4800X device family, and of course Windows Server 2016 Storage Spaces Direct will support this device. The P4800X device promises better latency and better endurance, so we took these devices for a spin in a Storage Spaces Direct configuration, comparing them to the… Read more

Hi! I’m Cosmos. Follow me on Twitter @cosmosdarwin. Review The storage pool is the collection of physical drives which form the basis of your software-defined storage. Those familiar with Storage Spaces in Windows Server 2012 or 2012R2 will remember that pools took some managing – you had to create and configure them, and then manage… Read more

// This post was written by Dan Lovinger, Principal Software Engineer. Howdy, In the weeks since the release of Windows Server 2016, the amount of interest we’ve seen in Storage Spaces Direct has been nothing short of spectacular. This interest has translated to many potential customers looking to evaluate Storage Spaces Direct. Windows Server has… Read more

The Challenge In the Windows Server team, we tend to focus on going big. Our enterprise customers and service providers are increasingly relying on Windows as the foundation of their software-defined datacenters, and needless to say, our hyperscale public cloud Azure does too. Recent big announcements like support for 24 TB of memory per server… Read more

Hello, Claus here again. One of the most important aspects when creating a volume is to choose the resiliency settings. The purpose of resiliency is to provide resiliency in case of failures, such as failed drive or a server failure. It also enables data availability when performing maintenance, such as server hardware replacement or operating… Read more

Hi! I’m Cosmos. You can follow me on Twitter @cosmosdarwin. Note: This blog was updated on January 6th 2017 to align more closely to official documention. Quick Review In Storage Spaces Direct, volumes can derive their fault tolerance from mirroring, parity encoding, or mirror-accelerated parity. Briefly… Mirroring is similar to distributed, software-defined RAID-1. It provides… Read more

Hello, Claus here again. I played one of my best rounds of golf in a while at the beautiful TPC Snoqualmie Ridge yesterday. While golf is about how low can you go, I want to give an update on how high can you go with Storage Spaces Direct. Once again, Dan and I used a… Read more

Hello, Claus here again. Dan and I recently received some Samsung PM1725 NVMe devices. These have 8 PCIe lanes, so we thought we would put them in a system with 100Gbps network adapters and see how fast we could make this thing go. We used a 4-node Dell R730XD configuration attached to a 32 port… Read more